Archives for category: Education Reform
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Study: Charter Schools Do Not Create a Rising Tide That Lifts All Boats

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2019 //
13

The conservative school-choice advocacy organization Thomas B. Fordham Institute published a report claiming that the existence of charters raises test scores in surrounding public schools. The claim is that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” This seems counterintuitive when you think about Detroit and Milwaukee, which are flooded with charters but mired at the bottom of urban districts tested by NAEP.

Now this assertion has been reviewed by a scholar and found to lack validity.

Contact:
William J. Mathis: (802) 383-0058, wmathis@sover.net
Yongmei Ni: (801) 587-9298, yongmei.ni@utah.edu

Report About Charters Being a “Rising Tide” Sinks Under Weight of Flawed Data

An NEPC Review funded by the Great Lakes Center

Key Takeaway: Due to data and methods limitations, report fails to prove its claim that higher charter market share is associated with achievement gains for all students.

EAST LANSING, MI (November 14, 2019) – A recent report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute examines whether average achievement in a school district increases as the “market share” of charter schools rises. The report argues that there is a positive competition effect.

Yongmei Ni of the University of Utah reviewed Rising Tide: Charter School Market Share and Student Achievement, and determined that its findings have limited use in guiding policy and practice, because of the flawed data and methods it employs.

Using a national data set of school districts with longitudinal records (allowing an analysis of each school district’s changes over time), the report found that overall, higher charter market share is associated with statistically significant increases in average reading achievement (but not math achievement). Further, the report finds some positive relationships for specific racial subgroups in districts of certain sizes and geographic locations. The report concludes that charter schools are “a rising tide” that “lifts all education boats.”

Professor Ni explains that these findings and conclusions should be interpreted with extreme caution because of major weaknesses surrounding the data and methods, including the measure of charter market share, the sample selection criteria, and the overreliance on results based on a small number of districts, especially those districts with over 95th percentile of charter market share.

Overall, she concludes, the findings have little use to policymakers because of these issues with data and methods and because the report does not probe beneath the surface. For example, it does not examine possible policy factors that might be associated with charter market share in a given area having a positive or negative association with public school systems. Similarly, it does not consider which practices might benefit charter schools and/or public school systems as a whole.

Find the review, by Yongmei Ni, at:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/rising-tide

Find Rising Tide: Charter School Market Share and Student Achievement, written by David Griffith and published by the Fordham Institute, at:
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/rising-tide-charter-market-share

NEPC Reviews (http://thinktankreview.org) provide the public, policymakers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected publications. NEPC Reviews are made possible in part by support provided by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice:
http://www.greatlakescenter.org

The National Education Policy Center (NEPC), a university research center housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, produces and disseminates high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. Visit us at: http://nepc.colorado.edu/

 

Categories Education Reform

Yes, Something Stinks about the State Takeover of the Houston Independent School District

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2019 //
11

A trio of activists on behalf of public schools wrote a blistering critique of the pending state takeover of the Houston Independent School District, based on the failure of ONE high school that has an unusually high proportion of students who are poor and have disabilities.

Zeph Capo is president of the Houston Federation of Teachers and Texas AFT, James Dixon is pastor of the Community of Faith Church in Houston and a vice president of the Houston Branch of the NAACP, and Hugo Mojica is president of LULAC Education Council #402.

They write:

Residents of this community are increasingly frustrated with the upheaval in the Houston Independent School District. As Houstonians who work directly with the educators, parents and students in the district, we don’t blame them. But something doesn’t add up in the state’s decision to take over HISD.

Houston schools have been on an improvement track for years — the district recently earned a B grade from the state — just two points away from an A. After years of struggle among legislators, administrators and educators to figure out how best to serve our kids, HISD should be celebrating our progress. But instead of cheering parents, educators and students, who came together and turned around the city’s schools, the state slapped our community in the face by announcing this punitive takeover of the entire district.

A byzantine Texas law enables the state to trigger a district takeover — all 283 Houston public schools — if just one school chronically underperforms. So instead of investing in that one school — Wheatley High School, in this case — and providing it the attention and resources it needs, Austin bureaucrats chose to scapegoat and punish the entire city. Given that Houston students just scored second in math and third in reading within their national peer group, HISD seems like it should be a model rather than a takeover target.

The writers might have also mentioned that Houston was the only city to win the Broad award for most improved urban district twice, an honor conferred by the Broad Foundation, which has the same worldview of disruption as the Texas State Board of Education and State Commissioner Mike Morath. Morath previously served on the Dallas board of education but he is not an educator. He is a software developer. He has no ideas about how to improve schools, nor has he ever improved a school.

The authors write:

This political power grab is the epitome of overreaching, but it also reflects an insidious, ongoing effort to deny black and brown communities the educational opportunities their kids deserve. It represents a classist, old-school view of public education that rewards the privileged few and ignores the difficult work that must be done to ensure schools are safe and welcoming and meet the needs of all kids, regardless of geography or demography.

What’s also incredibly disappointing is that this takeover comes on the heels of a democratic election, in which the community elected new school board members. If this untenable takeover proceeds, duly elected trustees won’t get a chance to take their seats, defying the will of the people and denying a voice for those elected to represent the needs of students.

Gov. Greg Abbott and Education Commissioner Mike Morath aren’t actually looking out for Houston’s kids. They want to privatize Texas’ largest school district through a charter scheme. If that happens, this plan will funnel money out of our traditional public schools and into for-profit alternatives. This recent election vote reflected the community’s mandate that Houston public schools continue to invest in evidence-based wraparound services, including health care, before- and after-school programs, and enhanced social and emotional services.

State officials would prefer to privatize rather than invest new resources in a major district that is facing challenges and doing well compared to other urban districts.

Yes, indeed, something stinks in Texas.

The state officials behind the takeover are vandals, disrupters, corrupters of democracy.

They should not be allowed to mess with the HISD.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Reform, Fraud, Houston, Privatization, Texas

New York City: More Testing Is Not the Answer

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2019 //
9

New York City’s Department of Education launched a new initiative with old and failed ideas: more testing for schools with low scores.

Liat Olenick, a teacher of science in elementary school in the city, explains why more testing is a very bad idea. She says smaller classes would be far more valuable and effective.

Categories Accountability, Class size, Education Reform, New York City, Testing

Australian Study: Is Digital Literacy Undercutting Literacy?

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2019 //
15

A newly released study in Australia raises questions about whether digital literacy is actually undermining children’s ability and interest in reading.

A Four Corners investigation has found there are growing fears among education experts that screen time is contributing to a generation of skim readers with poor literacy, who may struggle to gain employment later in life as low-skilled jobs disappear.

By the age of 12 or 13, up to 30 per cent of Australian children’s waking hours are spent in front of a screen, according to the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children.

Robyn Ewing, a Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Sydney, said this was having a tangible impact on vocabulary and literacy.

“Children who have been sat in front of a screen from a very early age start school with thousands and thousands of words less, vocabulary-wise, than those who have been meaningfully communicated with,” Professor Ewing said.

Four Corners gained exclusive access to the initial results of a national survey of 1,000 teachers and principals conducted by the Gonski Institute.

The survey found excessive screen time had a profound impact on Australian school students over the past five years, making them more distracted and tired, and less ready to learn.

The Growing Up Digital Australia study has been described by its authors as a “call to action” on the excessive screen use “pervasively penetrating the classroom”.

The study lead, Professor Pasi Sahlberg, said while teachers reported there were benefits to technology in the classroom, most also believed that technology was a huge distracting force in young people.

Categories Education Reform, Literacy, Technology

Politico Playbook: Trump’s Grueling Work Schedule This Week

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2019 //
30

Politico Playbook regularly posts the president’s schedule for the coming week.

This week leaves him plenty of time to watch FOX News, Tweet, and maybe play a few rounds of golf.

 

THE PRESIDENT’S WEEK AHEAD: TUESDAY: The president will hold a Cabinet meeting and have lunch with VP Mike Pence. WEDNESDAY: Trump will visit the Apple manufacturing plant in Austin. THURSDAY: Trump and First Lady Melania Trump will present the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal. FRIDAY: The president will participate in the NCAA Collegiate National Champions Day.

Categories Education Reform

Peter Greene: Betsy DeVos Blames Public Schools for Everything Bad

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2019 //
17

Peter Greene reports that Betsy DeVos won an award from an anti-feminist women’s group. She used the occasion to lambaste public schools (again).

You won’t hear her complain about the Ohio legislators who hope to outlaw facts. You won’t hear her complain about the religious schools that use the Bible as a science textbook.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Education Reform, Ignorance, Stupid

Maine: Legal Groups Join Lawsuit to Block Public Funding of Religious Schools

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2019 //
1

Two prominent civil rights legal groups joined to support the decision by the state of Maine not to use public funds for religious schools.
November 14, 2019
PFPS Urges Appellate Court to Uphold Maine’s Decision Not to Send Public Funds to Religious Schools
Public Funds Public Schools (PFPS) has filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief in federal appellate court in Carson v. Makin, a case challenging the State of Maine’s decision not to use public education funding to pay for tuition at private religious schools.
PFPS, a joint initiative of Education Law Center (ELC) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), is a national campaign to ensure that public funds are used to support and maintain public education and are not diverted to private schools.
As in other states, Maine’s constitution contains an education clause requiring the State to maintain and support a system of public schools available to all Maine children. To carry out this mandate, the State Legislature permits “school administrative units” that do not operate their own public schools for geographic or historical reasons to pay tuition to approved, nonsectarian private schools on behalf of resident children. Participating private schools must comply with a host of legal requirements to ensure they meet State education standards for an appropriate, nondiscriminatory education.
In 2018, three Maine families filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Legislature’s longstanding decision to limit the program to nonreligious schools. The district court rejected the plaintiffs’ arguments that the State’s exclusion of religious schools from the tuition program violates their rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.
The plaintiffs appealed, and the case is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. PFPS submitted an amicus brief in support of the Maine Commissioner of Education’s defense of the law, urging the appellate court to affirm the lower court’s decision.
PFPS’s brief emphasizes Maine’s compelling interest under the state constitution to preserve the carefully regulated tuition program in its current form. The brief explains that inclusion of religious schools would undermine the State’s construction of a limited program to fulfill its education clause duty in the narrow circumstances where a traditional public school is not available.
The amicus brief also details how expanding the program to religious schools would divert significant resources from Maine’s already underfunded public education system. Finally, it warns that, because religious schools often discriminate based on characteristics such as religion and disability, including them in the tuition program would entangle the State in regulating matters of religion or force it to fund discrimination.
“PFPS supports Maine’s decision not to spend limited public education funds on tuition for religious schools,” said Jessica Levin, ELC Senior Attorney and PFPS Director. “Unnecessarily expanding the tuition program would undermine the State’s constitutional commitment to provide an adequate public education to every child because it would divert funding away from a public school system that needs more, not fewer, resources.”
 “Our brief highlights Maine’s longstanding commitment to providing every child with an opportunity to attend school in an environment free from discrimination. We urge the court to uphold the legal framework promoting this essential goal,” said Sam Boyd, SPLC Senior Staff Attorney.”
For more information on voucher litigation and PFPS amicus briefs, visit the Litigation page of the PFPS website.
Press Contact:
Sharon Krengel
Policy and Outreach Director
Education Law Center
Public Funds Public Schools | 60 Park Place, Suite 300, Newark, NJ 07102
Sent by news@pfps.org
Categories Education Reform, Maine, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

“LilSis” Maps the Walton Billionaires Who Are Crushing the Teachers, Parents, and Public Schools of Little Rock

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2019 //
10

LilSis (also known as the Public Accountability Project) pays careful attention to the networks and money behind nefarious efforts to destroy the public sector.

In this report, LilSis describes the corporate backers of school privatization against whom Little Rock teachers went on strike. The money behind this network of interlinking organizations and individuals is the Walton family, whose wealth clocked in at $163 Billion (that’s Billion with a B) in 2018.

LilSis writes:

A major backer of the anti-union, pro-charter agenda in Arkansas is the Walton family, whose foundation is a huge funder of the school privatization infrastructure that exists across the state. In addition to the Waltons, corporate elites from Murphy Oil, the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce, the Arkansas Democrat Gazetteand others are backers of the school privatization efforts. These corporate interests are close to Governor Hutchinson, who supports their agenda, and they have close ties to the state Board of Education. In addition, they are also interlocked with a host of lobbyists and academics that push their agenda…

The Waltons are major advocate of charter schools nationally, and they carry out their school privatization agenda through their Walton Family Foundation, which showers hundreds of millions on pro-charter groups and schools. The foundation claims it has invested a whopping $407 million into pushing charter schools since 1997.According to a recent report put out by the Arkansas Education Association, the Waltons pump millions into propping up the state’s school privatization infrastructure – or what the report calls the “Arkansas’s School Privatization Empire.” 

It’s not just that the Waltons give big money to a few groups – it’s also that these groups then distribute that money to other organizations, lobbyists, consultants, and academics, creating a vast network of billionaire-funded activity to attack unionized teachers and push charter schools. 

For example, the Walton family Foundation gave $350,000 to the Arkansans for Education Reform Foundation (AERF) in 2017 – around 80% of all the contributions the organization took in that year. 

The AERF board includes other powerful funders and advocates of school privatization in the state, such as Claiborne Deming, the former CEO of Murphy Oil, a big backer of charter schools in Arkansas; William Dillard III, part of the Dilliard family that owns the Dilliard’s department stores; and Walter Hussman, publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the state’s flagship newspaper. Jim Walton is also on the board.

In addition to the $350,000 that the Walton donated to the AERF in 2017, Deming gave $60,000 and Dilliard III gave $10,000, while the National Christian Foundation gave $15,000, according the the group’s 2017 990 form.

AERF has in turn used the money it receives from the Walton billionaire fortune and other Arkansas elites to fund other school privatization efforts. For example, it gave $115,000 to Arkansas Learns, which describesitself as “the Voice of Business for excellent education options – including industry-relevant career pathways…” The CEO of Arkansas Learns, Gary Newton, is also the Executive Director of the AERF (for which he earned $189,639 in compensation in 2017). 

In turn, Arkansas Learns has the same board members as AERF, and Randy Zook, the CEO of the Arkansas Chamber of Commerce, whose wife Dianne Zook is on the state Board of Education that decided to end recognition of the Little Rock teachers’ union, is also a board member. Dianne Zook is also the aunt of Gary Newton.

What a cozy and mutually beneficial arrangement: The Waltons have a lot of money to hand out to achieve their goal of privatizing public schools and breaking unions, and the recipients take the money and carry out the Waltons’ wishes.

Any time you see a group called “XXXXXXX for Education Reform,” you can be sure it is committed to charter schools, union-busting, and privatization, and the odds are high that there is Walton money behind it.

The Waltons have claimed credit for subsidizing one of every four charter schools in the nation.

LilSis creates wonderful graphical depictions of networks.

Here is the LilSis graphic of the Little Rock school privatization network. 

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Little Rock, Privatization, Teachers, Unions, Walton Foundation

Eric Blanc: Why Little Rock Teachers Went on Strike

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2019 //
3

If you want to understand what is happening in the Little Rock school District today, read Eric Blanc’s article. 

Eric Blanc has covered every one of the teachers’ strikes since the West Virginia strike in the spring of 2018. Now he is in Little Rock, where he interviewed teachers who went on strike yesterday to protest the State Board of Education’s heavy-handed control of the district and its decision to strip school employees of collective bargaining rights.

Teachers are outraged that the State Board of Education, which took control of the district in 2015, utterly failed to improve student outcomes, yet refuses to relinquish control to a democratically elected board. Teachers believe that the state wants to resegregate the district.

Blanc writes:

Little Rock teachers today are not demanding raises for themselves, but an end to the state’s push to resegregate schools, its takeover of their district, its decertification of their union, and its disrespect for school support staff. As second grade teacher Jenni White explains, “this is literally about standing up for our kids and not dividing our community…

The immediate roots of this week’s action go back to January 2015 when the Arkansas State Board of Education announced that it was taking over Little Rock’s schools due to low standardized test scores. By all accounts, the ensuing state takeover failed to accomplish its nominal goal of improving stability and educational opportunities for the town’s low-performing schools. Yet rather than return Little Rock School District to local control in 2020 as promised, the state board instead proposed in September of this year that it would continue to oversee so-called “F”-rated schools, those with the lowest test scores.

Since all but one of the “F” schools were in black and brown neighborhoods south of I-630, teachers and parents saw this an attempt to create a two-tier school system. “The plan was blatantly racist, it separated the haves and the have notes,” Jenni White told me.

In a dramatic protest on the evening of October 9, thousands of teachers, support staff, students, and community members congregated on the steps of Central High, where the Little Rock Nine had famously confronted the National Guard decades earlier. Teresa Knapp Gordon, president of the Little Rock Education Association (LREA), closed the rally with the following declaration: “Either we accept segregation, or we stand and fight.”

This public outpouring forced the state board to change tactics. At the next evening’s contentious Arkansas Board of Education meeting, it dropped the proposal to split Little Rock’s school district. But surprisingly, the board then immediately proceeded to cease recognition of the LREA as the educators’ representative, thereby scrapping the last remaining collective bargaining agreement for school workers in Arkansas. The decision was blatant retaliation against not only teachers but also Little Rock’s school support staff, who were in the midst of negotiating a pay raise.

Next, the board issued a draft “Memorandum of Understanding” explaining that instead of returning full local control to the school board set to be elected in November 2020, the state would appoint a parallel “advisory board” that could veto local decisions. The Memorandum also insists on closing up to eleven neighborhood schools — which would thereby accelerate privatization, since state law gives charters first access to any vacant school. Stacey McAdoo, a teacher at Central High, told Labor Notes, “they are trying to charterize the [district] like what happened in New Orleans and disenfranchise people and make a separate school system out of the areas that are primarily Black and Latino.”

As in so many other states across the country, this offensive against the labor movement, public education, and working-class communities of color is being directly funded by billionaires. And it’s not just any billionaires: Little Rock teachers and students are up against the Arkansas-based Waltons, founders of Walmart and the richest familyin America.

The Walton family: the Death Star of Public Education. The ingrates who graduated from Arkansas public schools but now want to destroy them and public schools everywhere. Rich and shameless.

Categories Arkansas, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Reform, Failure, Fraud, Little Rock, Resistance, Segregation, Teachers, Unions

Glenn Sacks in the Wall Street Journal: Teachers’ Unions Have the Cure for What Ails America’s Schools

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2019 //
52

Wow! Talk about a surprise! Teacher Glenn Sacks managed to get an article with the title of this post in the Wall Street Journal, the newspaper that regularly vilifies teachers’ unions and praises privatization of public funds.

Yes, Sacks–a teacher in Los Angeles–contends that teachers’ unions fight to get teachers the time and support staff they need to do their jobs, so they are necessary and valuable.

The link that Sacks provided is not behind a pay wall.

The article begins:

The rookie science teacher looks at me with the same “Am I understanding this job correctly or am I crazy?” look I’ve often seen in the eyes of new teachers.

“No, you understand,” I say. “You’ve been thrown into a situation that requires an enormous amount of work and a good amount of ability, and it’s sink or swim. You might naturally expect the system to help you, or at least acknowledge the position you’ve been put in. It won’t.”

Teachers have come under considerable scrutiny in recent decades, and everybody claims to have the silver-bullet reform that will fix education. No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core, charter schools, raising the qualifications to become a teacher, limiting or abolishing tenure, and countless other measures have been taken up by Congress and state legislatures since I took my first teaching position in 1989.

Yet there is little public discussion about the education system’s central problem: Teachers don’t have enough time to do our jobs properly. Teachers unions understand this and fight to protect our ability to do our jobs.

He points out that some students can be assessed more accurately with an oral exam that with a written one, but teachers don’t have the time for that.

He writes:

Here are some ways to make teachers more effective:

  • Reduce class sizes, an issue in both the October teachers’ strike in Chicago and the Los Angeles teachers’ strike in January.
  • Provide teachers with support staff for clerical work.
  • Hire sufficient staff to eliminate extraneous chores.

Limiting class size and hiring sufficient staff would save teachers’ time from being squandered. That in turn would allow us to focus more on creating imaginative lessons and interacting with students.

Seeing Glenn Sacks’ article in the WSJ gives me hope that some people in the business world might read it and pay attention.

If they do, they will understand what real education reform looks like from the perspective of those who do the work, rather than those who sit in armchairs in think tanks.

 

Categories Class size, Education Reform, Teachers, Unions
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